Strawberry picking Robots

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Well this is not the first time we have seen robots harvesting food and probably not the last but a team in Japan has created a robot that selectively picks strawberries that are at least 80% red.  Though this might be good enough for the average consumer at the grocery store, I would personally insist on closer to 95% and hold off until they are a slightly darker red for some extra delicious super ripe berries.

They estimate that this robot can reduce picking time by by 40% but at 9 seconds a berry I am pretty sure I can easily keep up with this monster…though I eventually have to sleep and eat so the numbers may work out.  I also would have to make the assumption that this is being targeted for growing hydroponic strawberries given even with my primitive human vision I need to move some leaves around to see most of the berries I pick in my back yard.

There is no word on the cost of this strawberry picking robot but you can check out a video of this bad boy in action below.

7 Responses to “Strawberry picking Robots”

  1. Eliza Says:

    My robot-phobic boyfriend will be horrified when I show him this. I’m not surprised they only shoot for 80% red, that explains the less-than-stellar flavor of supermarket berries.


  2. The Cheap Vegetable Gardener Says:

    It is also 80% of one side of the berry…given in my experince the side not facing the sun is more than likely lighter than the front on average you probably will have an overall berry less than 80% red. Though this could be resolved by restricting to a specific hue of red which would be great as my own robotic strawberry butler to bring me fresh berries for breakfast every morning during the spring/summer.


  3. Matthew Says:

    Wonderful. Not only can we continue to have mass-produced tasteless food trucked thousands of miles to our stores, but now we can also rest assured knowing that neither dirt nor dirty human harvesters (both of which are really less than sterile, when you think about it) were needed to bring it to us. Terrific, bring on more factory robot fruits! Except of course for all of the now-unemployed strawberry pickers and the fact that we might as well just subsist on nutrient pills for all of the connection our “food” has with anything that could be called “nature” or “wholesome.” 🙁


  4. The Cheap Vegetable Gardener Says:

    Matthew, sad part is given most of our non-hydroponic food is grown in lifeless “dirt” instead of healthy soil not sure if one is really better than the other…though I know my garden strawberries beat both of them out 🙂


  5. Growing Vegetables Says:

    No wonder I have all the children on the estate trying to pinch my home grown strawberries. Not that I mind too much as it has given me the chance to expalin to them why they taste so much better than the ones their parents buy from the shops.


  6. Hannah T. Says:

    But there is a beauty in this that you guys are missing out on: sure, the strawberries the robot picks are not perfect, but this is so much more efficient that if it is ever implemented on a mass scale, the price of strawberries will go down. More people will be able to eat healthy, delicious strawberries more often, for less money, and eventually the technology will get better as it reaches wide adoption.

    Every advance in farming technology has only enabled more people to have better choices in what they can eat: 100 years ago, nobody in Canada would have been able to get oranges in January, but now they’re just a standard part of a healthy diet.

    So sure, to a few purists, things like this might seem terrible, but in reality now we can all find more quantity and types of fruits/vegetables at any standard grocery store than we would have been able to ever at any other point in history.


  7. Glennda Mirabete Says:

    Wait a minute, I wonder how does strawberry plant looks like in your area. I mean, as I see your strawberry here, it looks like a vine. In our area, it looks like a bush.


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